Intex SX1500 to Home Assistant

31. July, 2024GeneralStefan

Because of the “dumb” automatic timer in the Intex SX1500 sand filter pump, I added a Shelly 2.5 Switch and integrated it in my Home Assistant. With this setup, I am more flexible with different timeplans and I even see the power consumption of the Pump.

This needs first a modification of the Pump.
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage or injuries. Do this at your own risk and only if you know what you are doing. Always unplug any power mains before work.

Disconnect the mains plug! Remove the white cover and unplug the cable from the operating panel.

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Fix Windows Update Error 0x80070643

23. February, 2024MicrosoftStefan

Recently I had a few Windows 10 installations which failed with the following error when triying to download KB5034441:

The problem seems to be the update for Windows Recovery Environment, where the recovery-partition has less than 250MB of free memory.

To fix this, you have to change the partition size of the recovery partition.
ATTENTION: I am not responsible if you do something wrong here and lose all your data. Be careful what you do and always create a backup before any modifications on partition layouts. Continue only if you know what you do!

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UniFi Network Server on QNAP NAS

3. January, 2024Linux, NetworkStefan

This Post describes, how to install the UniFi Network Server as Docker image on a QNAP NAS.

The first step is to make sure you’ve installed Container Station from the QNAP App Center.
After this, open Container Station, go to “Applications” and click “Create”.
Give your application a name, for example “unifi-and-mongodb”.
Upload this yaml-code for docker-compose, replace “UNIFIPASSWORD” with a secure password, you will use this later to configure the database:

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Snapmaker 2.0 and Home Assistant

26. October, 2023Linux, Projects, WebStefan

Did you know that it’s possible to discover your Snapmaker 2.0 in your LAN? Just send an UDP discover Broadcast to Port 20054 and your Snapmaker will reply with his IP-Address, Model-Name and Status.

Update 19.01.2024: This project got some reactions, see here: HomeAssistant-Forum and here: Snapmaker-Forum
Meanwhile I created a new Script V2 which gets more Information from the Web-API, this makes the information below obsolete.
-> See new code on github
Maybe I will try to write a HomeAssistant Integration someday….

With this function, I inform my Home Assistant about the state of my Snapmaker. Home Assistant sends me a push-message if the 3D-Print, Laser-Cut or CNC is finished.
Because I only need this information, it’s not necessary to login, get info and logout to the Snapmaker.
Maybe I will write another script in future to read other values like process, temperatures, enclosure state etc.

Here is an example of my webhook-sensors in templates.yaml: (For more details see this Link)

# Snapmaker JSON Webhook
- trigger:
    - platform: webhook
      webhook_id: wh-snapmakera350
      allowed_methods:
        - POST
        - PUT
      local_only: true
  sensor:
    - name: "Snapmaker State"
      state: "{{ trigger.json.state }}"
    - name: "Snapmaker IP"
      state: "{{ trigger.json.ip }}"
    - name: "Snapmaker Model"
      state: "{{ trigger.json.model }}"

Then download the code on github and edit the python-script to your needs.
Run it in a cronjob, I do that on a separate raspberry-pi for example every 5min.

To notify me, this is my automation:

alias: Snapmaker Notify Finish
description: Notify finished printjob
trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id:
      - sensor.snapmaker_state
    from: RUNNING
    to: IDLE
condition: []
action:
  - service: notify.notify_me
    data:
      title: Snapmaker
      message: Snapmaker finished!
mode: single

That’s my quick and dirty solution.

Some printscreens of the HA-Dashboard:

I hope this will help you to get at least some information from your Snapmaker to Home Assistant. I still hope that we can get more information in future from an usable Snapmaker-API 😉

VMware vCenter: SCP Backup does not work

12. June, 2023GeneralStefan

Recently we changed the backup Server for our vCenter. The backup job over SCP worked for years on the old Server, but on the new one I was not able to configure the backup-schedule. I got always a timeout on the vCenter Server Appliance Management Web-GUI and I had to restart it with:

service-control --restart applmgmt

To get it working again without rebooting the whole vCenter Appliance.

After a few hours of debugging, I saw a process named sshpass which was hanging.
sshpass tries to find “Password:” in the prompt and sends then the password.

Now the problem was, the old Server had a prompt like:

Password:

And the new one had:

Password for username@servername:

So sshpass was not able to find “Password:” and timed out.

As both our servers are BSD, I had to fix the sshd config on the new Server for PAM in /etc/pam.d/sshd with adding of “authtok_prompt=Password:” and then restart sshd.

#auth required pam_unix.so no_warn try_first_pass
auth required pam_unix.so no_warn try_first_pass authtok_prompt=Password:

With this setting, the prompt changes from “Password for ….” to “Password:”.
And the backup-schedule works again 🙂